“In Search of ‘the People’ : A Rhetorical Alternative”

Michael Calvin McGee

• Early on McGee contends that students of rhetoric haven’t been terribly concerned with social theory – this is especially the case because most modern rhetoricians still bind themselves to Roman and Greek notions of the social instead of also relying on European theorists like Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, et. al.
• McGee’s problem seems to be much like Latour’s.  He has a problem with the definition of a collective entity of “the people.”  What is usually mean by this “the people” is actually abstractions of “person” or “individual.”  Latour would agree – relying on the “social” as a catchall is too convenient and usually fallacious.
• This attribution to “the people” is usually done in one of two ways:  first, they are broken down into numerous demographics that capture the spirit of the population.  This is the CNN maps version of distinguishing “the people”; second, “the people” are envisioned as a “mob” of individuals who can’t understand logical argument.
• McGee’s work here is to try and describe “the people” as “organic conceptions of human society, depended neither on observed behavrior of individuals or Platonic prejudices about the role of reason in human affairs” (343).
• McGee’s problem: “How can one conceive the idea “people” in a way which accounts for the rhetorical function of “the people” in arguments designed to warrant social action, even society itself?”
• Bormann’s fantasy theme analysis suggests that “the people” is a linguistic phenomena that “legitimizes” a collective fantasy (344).  In other words, the people are enacted by the rhetor, not a collective “out there” in the wild.
• According to Hitler, often “the people” are made into being by a leader that consolidates what is in front of their minds eye but that which they cannot express.  In this situation, “the people” are still an illusion because identity is an individual experience – not a collectivity (this is a difficult point for me to swallow).
• “The people” are more a process than a phenomenon.  “The people” can be defined four ways: 1) as an actualization or possibility of actualization of “total ideology” or the popular reasonings of an era; 2) actors in particular circumstances enact the people by consolidating dissociated ideological commitments into political myths in the hopes of creating a politically motivated audience; 3) when people being to believe a particular political myth, they are responding and hence, collectivized into “the people”; 4) “The people” eventually leave a particular political myth and allow it to decay.  This process of decay allows for the description of another instantiation of “the people.”
• This alternative reality enabled by the political myth is what Marx called “false consciousness”  or the world of political myths that make possible complete control over a population.  Examples of these political myths include JFKs “New Frontier,” or FDR’s reshaping of the Great Depression.  Despite being false consciousness, political myths ability to mobilize actors makes them very real.
• The push and pull of generational political myths is the “dialectic” of history.  Thankfully, McGee recognizes the multiplicity of “the people”s out there – he describes the tensions that arise between different competing publics or peoples as “competitive relationships.”
• Political myths defined: “ontological appeals constructed from artistic proofs and intended to redefine an uncomfortable and oppressive reality”  (348).
• To get an accurate picture of “the people” the rhetorician might describe the arguments and tensions between political myths at any given time – this complexity might better describe the public(s).
• The study of documents should point outward to the functions of rhetoric – not inward at their technique (according to McGee anyhow).
• Human responses, not events, define history.  Human responses are inherently rhetorical.  On another unrelated note: the Whig fallacy is “imposing on the past one’s own conviction and perception of what human responses to conditions ought to have been” (350).